The Bone Polisher Read online

  TIMOTHY HALLINAN

  “Hallinan has a genuine ability.”

  Washington Post Book World

  “Hallinan writes with humor and insight

  into the Los Angeles scene.

  He has a good eye for detail and

  accurately sketches all the scary shadows

  of nighttime Hollywood.“

  Los Angeles Daily Neius

  “Hallinan’s novels are entertaining

  and occasionally disturbing fantasies…

  His prose sparkles.“

  Virginian Pilot & Ledger Star

  “Hallinan captures the little idiosyncracies,

  the most mundane familial interactions,

  and infuses them with a depth of meaning

  not usually found in the crime genre.

  He even manages to do so with a

  sly grin and a loopy sense of humor…

  Do yourself a favor and read it!”

  Booklist

  “Creepy… Screamingly funny…

  A snappy thriller… The only question

  that remains unanswered is whether success

  will spoil Timothy Hallinan.

  With THE BONE POLISHER, it’s only

  a matter of time before we find out.”

  Mostly Murder

  “A modern-day successor to Raymond

  Chandler’s Philip Marlowe.”

  Newsday

  “A suspenseful mystery… a tale of

  love and death in LA with plenty of bone-

  crunching action, humor, eerie violence,

  and an intelligent assessment of why

  people do the deranged deeds they do.”

  St. Petersburg Times

  THE BONE

  POLISHER

  A Simeon Grist Mystery

  TIMOTHY HALLINAN

  Lyrics from “Muhammad’s Radio” by Warren Zevon. Copyright © 1978 Zevon Music. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  Copyright © 1995 by Timothy Hallinan Published by arrangement with the author

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 94-41316

  ISBN: 0-380-71372-1

  All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by the U.S. Copyright Law.

  Digital edition published by Hallinan Consulting, LLC

  Digital edition by eBooks by Barb for booknook.biz

  Cover by Allen Chiu, [email protected]

  FOR MUNYIN CHOY, MUSE

  PREFACE (2012)

  For more than a year, I debated making The Bone Polisher available as an ebook.

  More than the other books in the Simeon Grist series, it describes a world that has changed somewhat radically since the story was written. In the period in which the book is set, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome was nearly always fatal, and it was raging like a firestorm through the gay community. Also, back in those days, gay people were even more marginalized than they are now—which was, of course, one reason the medical community took so long to get on the right track about the disease's causes. And it was also the reason that outing someone, which is part of the book's plot, was a more devastating thing, in many cases, than it is now.

  These days, someone like the character Christopher Nordine wouldn't necessarily be looking at a death sentence. At the time the book was written, though, it was almost as certain as the sun coming up in the east.

  I wrote this story in the first place because I was arrested for drunk driving. As part of my penalty, the judge sentenced me to several months in Alcoholics Anonymous. This curdled my blood. I was certain I wasn't an alcoholic, and when I thought of Alcoholics Anonymous, I imagined dingy rooms with curling linoleum floors in which a bunch of unshaven, toothless men in raincoats chain-smoked and gummed uninteresting confessions at each other. Sort of like film noir, but eleven hours long and without a plot.

  But that was not to be. I lived above the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, and West Hollywood even then had a demographically anomalous number of gay people. My local meeting was in a church at Fountain and Fairfax. When I walked into that room for the first time, I was expecting a budget production of “The Lower Depths,” but what I got was more like the moment in “The Wizard of Oz” when Dorothy opens the door to reveal that Oz is in color.

  The room was full of the best-looking group of men I'd ever seen, although some of them were painfully thin. It soon became apparent that quite a few of them were there because they were determined to die sober, and others had come so they could live their last year or so in clarity. I saw more grace and courage in that first hour than I'd ever seen in such a concentrated period in my entire life.

  And I both cried and laughed myself silly, in that meeting and the meetings that followed. I made dozens of friends. I learned that I was, in fact, an alcoholic, and that I was in good company. I've never had a drink since, and it saddens me to know that so many of the guys who helped me are gone now.

  When I started The Bone Polisher, I was thinking of them. Because, since I'm straight, I felt unqualified to write about gay life from the inside, yet another gay man—also HIV-positive—was kind enough to read it and show me where I was screwing it up. I'd thank him here, but he's gone, too.

  Finally, the character of Max is based on a real individual, a former actor-turned-spiritual adviser, who was a great friend and source of support to my wife during a difficult period in her life, and for many years thereafter. He died at a ripe age of nothing but a long, rich life, and we've both missed him ever since.

  One thing I like about the book as I read it now—and it was noted by several reviewers—is that Simeon is feeling his age and has acquired a healthy fear of the people he has to face. He probably should have felt that way earlier in the series. Anyway, it's an element of the book that pleased me when I proofed the ebook conversion. And I notice that reasonable fear has been a component of both Poke Rafferty and Junior Bender since I began to write them.

  Hope you enjoy The Bone Polisher.

  I have never liked anyone at first sight.

  — W. Somerset Maugham

  The Summing Up

  Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Preface

  Epigraph

  ONE ~ Everybody Loved Max

  Prologue ~ Maybe Nebraska

  1 ~ The Book of Love

  2 ~ Blue Sky

  3 ~ Point-Blank Lohengrin

  4 ~ Spurrier

  5 ~ Requiem for Max

  6 ~ Tarnished Star

  7 ~ Cereal Killer

  8 ~ Eat at Mom’s

  9 ~ Carpet Cutter

  10 ~ Special Delivery

  TWO ~ The Black Widow

  11 ~ Killing Them Twice

  12 ~ Robert and Alan

  13 ~ Wolf Pack

  14 ~ The Hall of the Mountain King

  15 ~ Back Fence

  16 ~ Apartment Seven

  17 ~ Hesperia

  18 ~ Hard Drive

  19 ~ Typhoon

  20 ~ McCarvey

  THREE ~ The Wake

  21 ~ Long Distance

  22 ~ Calligraphy

  23 ~ Paragon

  24 ~ Paragon (2)

  25 ~ Paragon (3)

  26 ~ Good Friday

  About the Author

  Ebooks by Timothy Hallinan

  ONE

  Everybody Loved Max

  You know the sheriff has his problems, too,

  and he will surely take them out on you.

  —Warren Zevon

  “Muhammad’s Radio”

  Prologue ~ Maybe Nebraska

  The farm boy looked no mor
e than seventeen as he bent over the table. He had hair the color of corn.

  Dearest Max, he wrote. Then he leaned back and fished a package of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket and lit one. With the cigarette in his mouth, he looked older.

  The room was just a room, one in a series of rooms. If he’d closed his eyes he couldn’t have said what color the walls were. The low table, with its stack of white paper, was the only piece of furniture. The Farm Boy was sitting on the floor.

  Thank you for writing me such sweet letters. I really can’t tell you how much they mean to me, here in this wilderness. Just to know there is someone I can talk to. After all these years, even though I’m only seventeen.

  He tapped ash from the cigarette onto the floor and laid the butt on the table, the coal hanging over the edge. The table was striped with burns, long worms of dark wood. Without thinking, he ran his fingernail down one of them. His nails were long and well kept, and he scraped charred wood beneath the nail.

  “Shit,” he said, staring at the nail. Then he scrubbed it clean on the carpet and picked up the pen again.

  Do you remember Nester in the story of the Trojan War? He guided the young men, gave them his wisdom before

  He glanced at the book that lay on the floor beside him and swore softly, then scratched out Nester and wrote Nestor above it, and continued where he had left off:

  they went into battle. That’s what I hope you will do for me. Prepare me for the battle to come. I’m not sure I have the strength or wisdom to pre

  He closed his eyes for a moment, and then wrote:

  vail.

  Please, Max, write me again soon. You don’t need to send me the photo you promised. Your words tell me all I need to know about you. You are good and kind. It doesn’t matter how old you are.

  I want to come to you, but first I want you to write me again and tell me what kind of boy you really want. Tell me everything. If I am not right for you, I don’t want to push myself into your life. I need your help, but I don’t want to hurt you. If I think I can be good for you, I’ll call to see if you can send me money for the ticket to Los Angeles you promised me. It costs $650, and cash would be best. I am enclosing the gift I promised so I can recognize you at the airport. It belonged to the uncle I told you about, the only one who understood.

  He laid down the pen and picked up two silvery metallic objects, which he clinked in the palm of his hand like small change. He dropped them to the wooden surface, beside the letter. Then he took another puff from the cigarette and put it back on the edge of the desk.

  Oh, wait, I had to change my post office box because someone saw me there today and I’ve told you how people talk here, so I’ll have to drive into Kearney to get your next letter. Here is the new box number.

  He wrote a nine-digit number quickly, without referring to any of the papers in front of him. Then he signed it:

  Hope to see you soon,

  Philip

  “Oh, boy,” he said. He crossed out Philip and wrote Phillip.

  The Farm Boy leaned back and read the letter out loud and then reached for a clean sheet of paper to copy it over.

  He lifted something, a small white paperweight, from the white rectangular stack before he took a sheet, and then he replaced it, dead-center. The paperweight was a human finger, boiled to the bone.

  1 ~ The Book of Love

  “If he can see the future,” I asked, “why does he need me?”

  “He doesn’t think he needs anything,” the young man on my couch said with exaggerated patience. His calm was a cracked shell he was trying to hold together from the inside. “That’s why I’m here.”

  Beneath the baggy expensive clothes, the young man on my couch, who had identified himself as Christopher Nordine, was the kind of thin you don’t want to be. I could have closed my fingers around his wrists, and his knuckles bulged like walnuts beneath the pale, papery skin of his hands.

  “I don’t understand,” I said, giving patience back. “You just want me to talk to him?”

  A hand went to his slicked-back brown hair, touched it, and then left it alone. “Well, he won’t listen to me. We’ve been fighting night and day.”

  “About something he should be able to see in the future.”

  He made a soft sound, like “peh,” dismissing the future. “Maybe he’s right,” I said. “Maybe he doesn’t need anything.”

  Nordine lifted his hands slowly, as though the gesture hurt the muscles in his back, and rubbed long bony fingers over his eyelids. “Let’s say he is,” he said from behind his fingers. “Still, it’ll make me feel better.”

  He’d placed a bottle of Evian water on the table—my table, in my living room—and he took his hands from his face and raised the bottle to drink. The October heat was beating its wings against the uninsulated walls of my little wooden house in Topanga Canyon, and the temperature indoors had to be ninety-five, although Christopher seemed to have cooled it somewhat. The growing stack of very odd mail on the table—mail sent to me by dozens of companies whose computers had inexplicably decided I was about to be married—was curling at the corners. A bright brochure advertising HONEYMOON HEAVEN had slipped limply to the floor, belly-up, and gone flat. Even the rug was hot underfoot.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to take off your jacket?” I was wearing a T-shirt and running shorts, and I was pouring.

  “It’s wool,” he said, giving it a tug. “It breathes.”

  “I’d have to hear that from a sheep. It looks hotter than hell to me.”

  “I haven’t been hot in more than a year. I’m too skinny to get hot.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  He shook the bottle—only an inch or so left—and looked irritated. “So,” he said, gathering his calm around him again, “will you do it? I’ll pay you five hundred.”

  “Money’s not the issue. And if it were, it’d be because five hundred is too much.”

  “You don’t know Max,” he said. Christopher Nordine looked to be in his middle thirties, with thinning straight coffee-brown hair and odd pale eyes that had heavy rings under them. There was a crustiness over the skin of his eyelids, as though he hadn’t washed them when he woke up. His eyes, oddly deep set and restless, skimmed the room, my face, the room again, failing to find anything to hold them. He had a high-ridged, narrow nose and a sharp, wide mouth. He hadn’t shaved in a couple of days, and the whiskers had come in patchily, heavy at the tip of his cleft chin and lighter on his cheeks. Some sort of heavy cologne rolled off him in waves. Thirty pounds ago, he would have been handsome.

  “No, I don’t,” I said. “More water?”

  His sparse eyebrows went up inquiringly. “Have you got Evian?”

  “I’ve got more Evian than the source,” I said. “Someone brought me three cases of it.”

  “He must be fond of you.”

  “It’s a she,” I said, “and the fondness comes and goes.”

  “Ah.” He didn’t sound very interested. “And whose fault is that?”

  When I don’t expect a question, I’m usually stranded with the truth. “Mine.”

  “I know all about that,” Nordine said with sudden bitterness. “I could write the book.”

  “ ‘The Book of Love,’ maybe. Remember that?” I got up and went to the kitchen, a depressingly short walk, and threw open a cabinet. I had half a loaf of stale bread, two dusty cans of tuna, and thirty-six bottles of Evian, courtesy of my ex-girlfriend, Eleanor Chan, who had recently been trying to get me healthy. Again. “ ‘Chapter One says you love her, love her with all your heart.’ ”

  “ ‘Chapter Two, you break up,’ ” Christopher Nordine sang with perfect pitch, “ ‘but you give him just one more start.’ ”

  “I don’t think that’s it,” I said, toting a full bottle back into the living room and trying to stay upwind of myself. I needed a shower. He took the bottle eagerly.

  “I hate oldies anyway. I’m getting to be too much of an oldie myself.” He drank. />
  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “You’re what, thirty-three, thirty-four?”

  He took the bottle from his lips and smiled, not a pleasant smile. “I’m twenty-seven,” he said.

  As hot as it was, I could still feel my face burn. “Oh,” I said.

  “Twenty-seven, going on dead,” he said.

  It was terrible, and it was probably true, but it was also self-consciously dramatic, and I realized that one of the reasons I was resisting Christopher Nordine was that I didn’t like him very much. But it wasn’t the only reason.

  “I still don’t really understand what you want me to do.”

  His eyes gleamed, and I saw what was wrong with them; he’d lost the fat that cushioned the eyeballs, and they’d sunk back into his head, too far back for normal eyes, where they glittered like water down a well. He was burning his own body for fuel.

  “I live with the man,” he said fiercely. “He’s seventy-seven years old, and he’s living like a fool. He’s going to get himself hurt or killed.”